FoodStop

FoodStop is a project for Oxford Hack 2022.

Try it

0. Clone the repo, install Node.js and run npm install.

1. Run node index.js

2. Go to http://localhost:8080 in a browser.

Inspiration

When a restaurant closes, there is a lot of leftover food that goes to waste meanwhile there are a lot of people that do not have easy access to food. We hoped to fix both of these problems at the same time by getting these two groups in touch.

What it does

We designed a platform that allows cafes to post a listing near closing when they have food going spare. This information is then accessible on the website by others to see what food is available in their area, how many portions are going spare and what time the food is available until. For people that don't have access to the internet, like the homeless, billboards will be used to display the nearest restaurants and directions to get to them. The billboard works out which display to show based of the stock of food left in each of the businesses and displays a route to the nearest outlet that still has food spare. The billboard also show other near businesses and displays the time that they close.

How we built it

This project is mostly a rough prototype, with a mock-up of the billboard screens and a website that displays the information and location of the cafes needing to get rid of food. This was built using HTML, JavaScript and Bootstrap with the visual mock-up of the billboard made in PowerPoint.

Challenges we ran into

We first struggled to think up a project we all wanted to run with. Once we started, we had a few issues with technology misbehaving and things not working quite how they should. Our lack of knowledge with using most tools for the first time presented some issues and slowed down progress of the project. This lead to us not being able to do as much as we'd hoped on the project and having to cut a few corners at the end to make it presentable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a nice looking website with good mock-up of a billboard with most parts of the project working at prototype standard.

What we learned

a lot of the tools used in this project were previously unused by half of the team. This meant there was a lot of learning how to use the tools before we were able to make proper progress

What's next for Food Stop

Because of limited time and skill, we couldn't implement google maps to show location properly. This meant that the maps had to be implemented as just a still image. The next steps would be to properly implement the maps and locations for Cafes.